Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the optimization of the transmission of media contents between a multimedia resource function and a plurality of terminals when these terminals are conferees in a same video call conference. This multimedia resource function belongs to a first telecommunication network that is an Internet Protocol Multimedia Subnetwork (IMS) network, and the terminals may be connected to the same IMS network or to a second telecommunication network that constitutes an “outside world” with respect to the first network because it uses different protocols.
Description Of The Prior Art
For instance, the first network is an IMS operator network, and the outside world is the World Wide Web (the “Web”) operating on the Internet. There are interconnections between these two worlds. These interconnections are made by gateways using Web standards (eg. W3C webRTC or IETF rtcWEB) and legacy telecommunication standards (eg. 3GPP IMS, OMA RCS . . . ). Such a gateway acts as a bridge for signalization and data (media) channels according to each side standards.
In the Web, the logic of an application is generally placed in the end user terminal, for instance a smartphone. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has drafted an application programming interface called WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) to enable browsers to run applications for voice call, video chat, and peer to peer file sharing, without plugins. An advantage of WebRTC, among others, is that each user can use an application that is not downloaded from a store and not previously installed in its terminal. This application remains in an application server, in the operator network. This will allow to distribute or make available a huge set of applications that the providers will update and modify without any modification in end users' terminals.
In the operator telcommunication networks, the users, even with smartphones, use basic applications (audio call, video call, presence, address book, instant messaging, shared document . . . ) to reach services deployed in these operator networks, because these services are essentially provided by application servers deployed in the operator networks.
The known gateways only act as bridges for signalization and data (media) channels. As it will be explained further, the transmission of video streams for a video call conference uselessly consumes some network resources between the multimedia resource function and the multimedia gateway.
The purpose of this invention is to optimize the transmission of media contents between a multimedia resource function and a plurality of terminals.
This purpose can be reached by applying the method and the gateway according to the invention.